Avoidance…

I’m good at that shit.  Normally I’d be on FB, or random stumbling, or anything, just to avoid this page.  But it’s gotten to the point where I’m avoiding the computer completely.  **Other than to watch Season 4 of SOA, which is now available on Netflix, and my ultimate obsession.  Season 5 makes a lot more sense now that I’ve seen 4, lol…**

Yeah, there I go again.  Effective 10 minutes from now, we’ll have 24 days clean.  24 days without opiates, whether it be a pill that gets swallowed or sniffed, or a bag of dope that gets shot.  I didn’t think we’d make it.  We got high on a Tuesday morning, as usual.  Then packed up the truck and the Candy-Kitty and took off.  We’d said our goodbyes to the boys – to both C at the group home, and D the night before, along with a few of the other ones we consider “our boys”.  By about 6pm, we were starting to have some issues with the truck, and it wasn’t looking good.  We were doing Suboxone therapy so that we could make it through the withdrawal “easy”.  Bullfuckingshit.  I’d had people (multiple) tell me the 10 strips we bought should get us through a month, weaned down slowly.  The strips didn’t last 3 DAYS.  And they didn’t do shit.  We wound up getting off the highway, and stopping at the first cheap chain motel we saw, neither of us were in any shape to drive, and neither was the truck.  We each crawled into a bed in the room Tuesday evening, and didn’t really move from those spots (except to fight over the bathroom) until mid afternoon on Friday, when one of Jeff’s family members came to get us.  The kick was horrible – no better with the suboxone than it was the first time, kicking on a hard cot in a cold jail cell.  At least this time we had pillows and a decent bed, though.

My body had a real hard time coming out of the kick.  Jeff was a little quicker than me, pushing himself to function somewhat by Friday, and completely by Monday.  Me?  I was still hallucinating (I’d also run out of xanax so was dealing with the benzo withdrawal on top of the opiate withdrawal – YAY me).  2+ weeks into it, and Jeff took me to the ER because I still couldn’t keep food down and was so weak.  Amazingly, the tox screen they ran showed me STILL POSITIVE for opiates, more than 2 weeks after I’d touched them.  I’m just now getting back to eating (not much, but something) and being able to stand for more than 2 minutes without feeling like I’m gonna pass out.

This shit is hard.  My body aches and hurts in ways I’d forgotten about.  I’d been on pain meds since… 2001.  Continuously.  And then I moved past the prescriptions.  My pain was controlled.  Now?  It’s so far from controlled that it brings tears to my eyes at times.  Same with Jeff – there’s a reason we were started on narcotic pain meds to begin with – because we NEEDED them.  So what do we do now?  It’s a scary thought process.  Because I know that if/when I pop a 30 to make the pain go away, somewhere in my head, there’s a voice that’s going to be saying – “you’re wasting your time and money.  You know the other shit works better for the pain.  It’s cheaper, it kills the pain better, and then there’s the high…”.   We’ve been trying non narcotic options, but nothing is working.  We’re 34 & 39 years old, not 90.  Chronic pain truly sucks.  Sucks even more when you’re an addict.

Avoidance… avoidance of writing here.  Why?  Because I’ve always been on something when I wrote.  Always.  Fear that I can’t write sober.  Avoidance of making decisions.  We’re welcome where we are long term, but we already know it’s not going to last long term.  There’s dynamics in the house that put us BOTH in a really bad place.  Not a healthy place at all.

But the important thing?  Is that the track marks on our arms are slowly fading.  The urge?  Not so much.  We’re in Smalltown, USA here, but traveled an hour to what passes for “big city” around here to see if we could find ANYTHING.  Wasted gas, wasted trip.  Nada.  We would’ve settled for the damn synthetic weed, the research chemical shit.  Just something to ease the pain for a little while.  So far, no luck.  We know 5 people, all straight arrows. Gonna take some time, I guess, to either get used to the pain and just suck it up, or find something to treat it with.

But for now, we’re sober.  And our son is thrilled with that – he’s proud of us.  That means the world.  My mind is all over – it’s time for sleep here.  But I do plan on getting back to blogging.  This calmed me a little, distracted me some.